“I’ll begin this story the same way I began the phone call to my wife: “I’m OK, but…,” Chuck La Tournous writes for Macworld.

“The ‘but’ began on a Tuesday morning, after I started walking from the parking lot to the front door of my office building. I began feeling short of breath. No matter how deeply I inhaled, it felt like my lungs weren’t filling up completely. At first, the feeling just seemed odd—nothing serious, just…weird,” La Tournous writes. “By the time I climbed the flight of stairs to my floor, the feeling had grown worse. Along with the shortness of breath, I could feel my heart racing in my chest. Stopping to talk to a colleague on the way to my office, the mere act of speaking left me practically gasping for air. I cut the conversation short and continued to my office. Sitting still made me feel better, but not great.”

“It was then I thought about the heart rate sensor on my Apple Watch,” La Tournous writes. “I opened the Heart Rate app, curious to see if my heart rate was actually elevated or if it was just my imagination.”

Thank You for supporting MacDailyNews!

5 Comments

Its good to see the simple health monitoring features of the apple watch paying off in a big way for the writer of this article. As for me, I want to get a blood pressure system from one of mdns many advertisers. I still am hoping someone will ship a system that integrates with the watch to measure blood glucose. At that point the watch will move from a want to to a gotta have for the millions and millions of people around the world that are either pre-diabetic or already suffer from the disease.

Happy to say that my wife is now a DexCom warrior. Look them up. You don’t have to use their reciever, but it won’t yet go to the Watch without first going through your iPhone. I’m sure it will soon. And that has saved my wife on quite a few occasions now.

The author was obviously suffering a severe medical condition and ignored the symptoms and people heap praise of him? For f@ck sake, he was “gasping for air”. This guy “needed” an Apple Watch to know he was in dnager? Another thing, this moron waited hours to react, he’s lucky to be alive. Shit, anyone with common sense could have measured their own pulse without an Apple Watch. Perhaps he could of see a physician earlier if Apple Watch flashed a message, “You’re gonna die any minute, dumbass, if you don’t see a physician”.

I’ve got an AliveCor EKG device attached to the back of my iPhone 6. It’s a FDA-approved single-trace EKG. Works great. It’ll use software algorithms to tell you if you’ve got afib or a normal pattern, and then you can have it read by a cardiologist within minutes for a small fee.

My dad was a cardiologist, and he would take my EKG whenever I needed a physical, and I can say the AliveCor trace looks just like those EKG traces my dad used to do. I don’t need to take my EKG all the time, but I like tech and since my dad was a cardiologist, and my older brother a cardiothoracic surgeon, this appealed to me, and it was only $75.